Stack weighs making play for HCDO Chairmanship

UNION CITY – Mayor Brian P. Stack grabbed a pen, wrote the number 115,000 and circled it and circled it again on a throw-away paper placemat in the Four Star Diner.

“That’s what Democratic Party turnout should be in Hudson County in a non-presidential election year,” he said, reaching for another cup of coffee.

In the 2009 gubernatorial election, then-Gov. Jon Corzine mustered 82,075 Hudson votes on his way to statewide defeat, a respectable figure relative to Hudson County’s own U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez’s vote total of 88,696 in 2006, but unacceptable, in Stack’s opinion, when considering Republican turnout in Ocean and Monmouth counties last year for Gov. Chris Christie and the potential for Christie to mobilize more GOP voters.

“Unacceptable, when you think about what organizing can get you,” insisted Stack, generally regarded here as the fierce master architect of old school, constituent-based politics, who’s longtime rep is that he’d rather drill down repeatedly into his own base than climb, who famously destroyed the Hudson County Democratic Organization (HCDO) with his 2007 state senate campaign.

Significantly, national Menendez, too, considers the numbers worrisome as he reels from Christie’s win, and Scott Brown’s GOP impact victory in the Massachusetts U.S. Senate race two weeks ago – larger landscape losses for the Democrat and chair of the U.S. Senatorial Campaign Committee, which now put that much more pressure on his home county to produce overwhelming results when Menendez runs for reelection in 2012.